Choosing Oranges

Orange is one of my favourite fruits that I buy for our Friday Fun Session participants. How would you choose the good ones from hundreds of them; especially, on the way to office, when you stop by the supermarket, in the morning rush hour?

To speed up the selection while at the same time choosing the good – firm, smooth and heavier compare to its size – I have devised a selection process. I would go from left to right, scoring each of the oranges, in a scale from 0 to 9, 9 being the best; and once a row is done, I go to the next row and so on. As I go and score, I would also choose the best one among each consecutive, say 5 oranges.

How that would look like?

Input:

5

1 3 5 7 3 5 9 1 2 5

Output: 7, 9

Explanation:

The first line says: choose the best among consecutive 5. The second line shows the score for each of the 10 oranges. The first 5 are: 1, 3, 5, 7, and 3; best among them is 7. We choose 7. The next 5 are: 3, 5, 7, 3, and 5; best among them 7 – already chosen. Move on to the next 5: 5, 7, 3, 5, and 9; best among them 9, pick that. Move to the next 5: 7, 3, 5, 9, and 1; best among them is 9, already chosen. Next 5 are: 3, 5, 9, 1, and 2; once again the best among them 9 is already chosen. Final 5 are: 5, 9, 1, 2, and 5; same as before. We cannot move further as we don’t have 5 oranges after this point.

We end up with two oranges: 7 and 9. I am not doing a bad job of selecting the best oranges for you, am I?

Input:

4

1, 3, 5

Output: None

The first line says: choose the best among 4. However, the second line shows only 3 oranges. Obviously we cannot choose any.

Input:

3

1 2 4 9

Output: 4, 9

Choose 4 from 1, 2 and 4. And then choose 9 from the next consecutive 3: 2, 4 and 9. And we are done!

Task: If we have a total of n oranges and we got to choose the best from each consecutive m, I am looking for a solution having better than O(mn) time complexity.

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Author: Gopal Das

I am working as a Principal Consultant at JLT Interactive Pte Ltd, Singapore.
I have a BS in Computer Science & Engineering from Khulna University and ME in Internet Science & Engineering from Indian Institute of Science (IISc).
I have a few publications on Query Optimization in RDBMS in ACM SIGMOD, IEEE ICDE etc.
I was a founding team member and VP Engineering of iTwin, a spinoff from A*STAR.
I am working as a software engineer for 14 years.
I am interested in Algorithms, Database, Security, Machine Learning, and Blockchain among others.
I am a father of two children and live in Singapore.
www.linkedin.com/in/dasgopal
https://github.com/gopalcdas
View all posts by Gopal Das